Dennis cut his coding teeth by teaching himself BASIC on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer in the early 80's. His earliest memory of debugging a program was when he found that his mother had typed the letter O instead of the digit 0 in a hexadecimal string that defined the graphics of a program she copied from the listing in a magazine.

After discovering Delphi 1.0 during college, he went to work on a fax broadcast system and other telephony projects.

In the late 90's he worked with a few record labels to put software on their music CD's. This included Windows screen savers of album art work and a music player that scrolled the lyrics of each song across the screen -- all written in Delphi.

After that, he spent about 5 years doing web development in PHP (even working with a PHP MVC Framework) before discovering ASP.NET and C#.

He remained somewhat proud of the fact that he had never worked with Visual Basic until starting a job in 2007 where it was the company's language of choice for developing Microsoft Office customizations for the legal industry. Even though he got lost any time he tried to look at VB6 code, with the advent of LINQ to XML and XML Literals in VB9, he was happy to be a VB.NET developer.

Upon returning to full time web development, he was pleased to discover that with jQuery and other libraries like Underscore and Knockout, working with JavaScript sure isn't what it used to be.

His current job is primarily working with C# and some T-SQL for server side systems, but his passion is moving towards functional programming. He's experimenting with F# and learning Erlang. He recently started the Dallas Functional Programmers user group. (dallasfp.com)